Antwerp's Former Smidt van Gelder Museum Becomes a Design Gallery
Objects With Narratives, a Belgian gallery for collectible design and functional art, opens its new flagship on December 9 in the former Smidt van Gelder Museum in Antwerp, a 1905 town palace that closed in February 1987, when a fire destroyed several of its rooms. The gallery was founded by Oskar Eryatmaz and the brothers Nik and Robbe Vandewyngaerde, who worked at Herzog & de Meuron and OMA, and is moving its flagship there from the Grand Sablon in Brussels.
A banker's palace, then a museum
In 1905 the architect Joseph Hertogs joined two townhouses on the site into Hotel Thys, a Beaux-Arts town palace for the banker Edouard Thys-Cateaux, with facades drawn from 18th-century French hôtels. The collector Pieter Smidt van Gelder bought the house in 1937, saving it from demolition.
He lived in an apartment upstairs and displayed his art collection in the other rooms, and in 1949 gave the house and the collection to the City of Antwerp, which ran it as a municipal museum. After the fire, damage and structural instability left the building empty for years.
The restoration
AG Vespa, the city's real estate company, has owned the house since 2010 and restored it with DMT Architecten and MAAT_WERK architecten. The foundations were underpinned, the roof structure renewed and the facades conserved. The original sequence of monumental entrance hall, staircase hall and the reception hall on the main floor was kept.
Erik Dhont Landscape Architects restored the garden, with particular attention to its original sculptures, vases and fountains.
The house covers about 2,500 square meters, and the gallery will use the 2,000-square-meter garden behind it for sculpture.
What the gallery will show
"We see the works we present as the antiques of the future: pieces made today with the intention, skill and material honesty to carry meaning for generations," the gallery said when it announced the move.
The Aquilon cabinet by Maison Jonckers is already installed in the house's hidden mirror room. The first solo show, Forest Fruits by the Copenhagen-based Danish artist and designer Karl Monies, opens in December, with Monies turning the gallery into an imagined forest floor.
His series Bonum Lumen, Latin for good light, is a set of illuminated metal forms that resemble mushrooms without copying any species. They are assembled from copper, brass and bronze, joined with visible rivets and brass fittings, and the metal is left to take on a patina over time.
The gallery opens at Belgiëlei 91 on December 9, the eve of Art Antwerp, and shows next at BRAFA in Brussels, open to the public January 24 to 31, 2027. Regular visiting hours have not been published.
